Folk Art Birds Heart

So, recently I've been making my designs into templates and selling them in my Etsy shop (www.folkartpapercuts.etsy.com).  Usually a make the papercut and then create the template by scanning in the finished design and cleaning it up in Photoshop.

This time, however, I thought I'd try and create it a different way.  I drew out half my design - by hand in pencil.  Then I scanned my hand-drawn image into Adobe Illustrator and digitally traced it on my Wacom tablet.  Then I copied my vectorised drawing and flipped it horizontally and matched up the two halves of my design.

I then filled in the solid parts of my template with the live paint bucket in Illustrator - thus creating my symmetrical template.  I was then able to print my template onto the back of this gorgeous pearlised blue paper (from Hobbycraft).  But because I'm still very much a beginner at using Illustrator, there were some parts of the design I wasn't completely happy with - so I cut my design today from my template - but I tweaked it as I went along.  This is the final result and I'm really happy with it.  It was an interesting exercise!